Would You Swim In This Glass Bottom Pool, 42 Floors Up

There's a very nice brand new luxury apartment building in Houston, Texas that has one great feature.

A swimmer's view through the bottom of a glass bottomed pool on the side
of the 42-story luxury apartment buidling in Houston, Texas

A swimming pool.

Yes, I know. Lots of expensive apartment complexes have swimming pools.

This one, though, is 42 stories up on the side of the building. And hangs over the edge. And has a glass bottom.

Watch the video at the bottom of this post and see if you would use it.

Part of the video was taken by someone walking across the pool in the water, looking down through the bottom of the pool at the street more than 500 feet below.

Yikes!

I doubt you'd fall through, given the pool has an eight-inch thick plexiglass floor, but then again, accidents can happen, can't they?

The pool extends outward ten feet from the side of the building. I hope the braces that hold it in place are strong.

They must be. Imagine the insurance pay out if the pool failed.

I still don't know if I'd try swimmig in this pool. Would you?

By the way, you probably can't swim there. It's a private pool, open only to residents of the building.

Here's the video:

Swiss Building Turns Into Art by Closing, Opening Windows

This video has been making the rounds on this Internet thingy all day, but I like it enough to show it here, too.

Students in the 11-story University of Health Sciences building in Lausanne, Switzerland  had wayyyyyyy too much time in their hands and did a stop motion video of them opening and closing windows and shutters on their building. The opening and closing of windows and shutters formed sort of a human analog display.

This is the brainchild of artist Guillaume Reymond and Trivial Mass Productions, I'm told. But it's so entertaining and worth the watch:

Bridge to Nowhere

Up here in Vermont, we're replacing a lot of bridges that got washed away by the epic floods from Tropical Storm Irene back in late August.

Too bad we don't have a lot of money to play with. Nobody knows exactly how we're going to pay for the new roads and bridges we need. But we're building them anyway and hoping for the best.

But if we did have money to spend, I wish we could build a span like the one in Norway pictured in this post. Believe it or not's it's not a bridge to nowhere, like that one in Alaska a few years ago that got people riled up.

It's built in a way that gives the illusion that if you drive on it, you take a big dive into what looks like terribly cold water. I'd be afraid to drive across it. But you can go quite safely over the bridge and not worry about anything, the span's designers said.

Next up, maybe, a house that looks like it has no walls. As far as I know that doesn't exist, but hey, architects out there, impress me. Design a house like that!

Montreal is Europe in North America

Last weekend, I went to Montreal, Quebec, Canada,  which is less than an hour and a half from my St. Albans, Vermont home. So I practically live in a Montreal suburb.

A street in Montreal's Old Port

I need a big city fix every once in awhile. I define "big city" as anything over about 250,000 people, so my standards are pretty small.

Hey, I live in Vermont, where the biggest city, Burlington, has about 40,000 people, so the entire population of the city can easily fit in many stadiums. All of Vermont has the population of a small city, roughly 630,000 people.


Given how close I live to Montreal, it's a wonder I don't go there more often. I hadn't been there in nearly a year. Just too busy.

A stained glass window in the Notre Dame
Basillica of Montreal

One thing I like about Montreal is it is in some ways architecturally like a European city. Of course, there's the Old Port, the area of buildings dating back 300 years or so. It kind of looks like an old neighborhood in Paris or something.   A particular highlight is the Notre Dame Basilica of Montreal, with its beautiful ornate interior.

I made sure to take plenty of photos while I was there.

Even the nondescript houses, apartments and neighborhoods in Montreal are built differently than those in the United States. The run-of-the-mill buildings in Montreal are not distinctive, necessarily, but it's nice, just for a change, to see architecture that's a little different than in my home state, just a short distance away.

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Montrealers speak French, or at least a version of French known as Quebecois. That also helps you feel like you've gone to Europe.

I'm happy to say I can almost say I live within spitting distance of Europe. It makes me sound so haughty, pretentious and special.

The colorful exterior of a Montreal building

Of course, not really, as unlike the well-dressed Montrealers I was surrounded by, I wandered the city dressed in Carharrts and a flannel shirt.

You can bring a hick Vermonter to the city, but you can't take the hick out of the Vermonter.